Site: EroticPBM.net Cost: $7.95 for 30 days, recurring every 30 days Genres:: Fetish, Gothic, Alt-porn Condoms: Sometimes One-line summary: Like SuicideGirls, only not as good or complete, and more expensive. Reviewer: Mark Buckingham

Rating:

I kind of feel bad for start-ups in the world of Internet porn. Newcomers without a massive payload of porn just waiting to be deployed on some website have a tough road ahead. EroticBPM.com is one such site. They may mean well, but they're just doing too many things wrong.

The menu bar at the top once you log in must have been put up in order of descending quality or level of completion. Starting out with the pics, you get solo girls, girl pairs, girls with boys, then some forums that are supposed to have "party" and "art" pics. True to the idea of a forum, there ends up being a lot more talk than images, so you can skip those. The rest of the pic sections are the best thing the site has going for it. While the early sets (some girls have several shoots posted) have some wicked bad photography—low-res, blurry, or grainy—the more recent shoots are much better, bigger, and more fun to snoop through. The pics can be skimmed through and saved if you like. No all-at-once archives to download, though.

The actual women here range from fairly "normal" looking to your full-tilt gothic girl with black nails, red dreads, plentiful tattoos, and more piercings than airport security will ever be comfortable with. The irony is, if interests and education are any indication, these girls who look ready for Halloween or a spree of terror on the outside are actually some of society's best and brightest. Web designers to poets to artists to information technologists, I wonder how they get away with looking the way they do in corporate America. Could be because they're damn fine to look at under all that costuming and they have their shit together.

The video is a mixed bag. The content is okay at best. Some just strip, while others get a little more invasive. One gal makes a huge long sword of a dildo vanish up in her without a trace. On the other hand, there are only a dozen or so clips available, and they come in Shockwave Flash format. Not bad for fast streaming, but they play really small and low-res, sometimes becoming too skippy and erratic for my patience. If you have the know-how, you can save the clips, but I didn't feel compelled to watch any of them more than once or twice.

The girls have the option to leave journal entries and detailed profiles, some even putting their personal email addresses in there, should you want to try to contact them. The forums show promise and some reasonable activity, if that's your thing. However, the Journals section is either incomplete or not terribly user friendly. Nothing on that page works, you can't read the journals here, and it apparently requires a separate login, but no place to sign up. The Webmaster even admits right there that if you forget your password, you're screwed until s/he gets around to writing a password recovery script. Nothing like paying for unfinished goods.

The boy + girl pages had promise, but ultimately didn't wow me, having very little action to be seen, and with guys sporting somewhat unimpressive equipment on the whole. The Cams page gives you a typical small preview of quasi-interactivity with some scantily clad lass, then you have to sign up for something else to keep it going. Overall, there are a few things worth seeing here, and the price isn't bad, but the site is a lot like some of its members: emaciated and smothered in empty flair. But while the site is simply hollow and starving for content and completeness, at least the girls within have something besides looks to get them through life. I love nerdy, eccentric, technophilic women; I don't like a site whose reach exceeds its grasp.